My career path is a little unusual, but I genuinely think starting off with trading is a tremendous place to start a career.

Trading is genuinely fun. It's about updating quickly when you are wrong, understanding your unique advantages, understandingn your disadvantages, and extensively preparing for the unexpected moment where moving fast will be extremely lucrative.

I do genuinely believe that market making does make the world better, efficient markets are to some extent the bedrock upon which commerce and trade can be built off. There's a reason greasing the wheels of capitalism is so profitable, and that's because it does in fact have value. It's good for Kellog that they can buy huge amounts of corn at any time of the day to be delivered to them at a specific determined time and place in the future. It's good for corn farmers to be able to easily and effienctly sell their corn in advance.

That being said, man is trading not personally fulfilling. It really engenders a zero sum view of the world. While it is true that it's good for society to have deep efficient capital markets, swimming in those markets as a trader or market maker is zero sum. If you are long a commodity definitionally someone else must be short on the other side. The societal good of efficient markets is so completely abstract, there's no way to really see any of the good you are doing. Everything is numbers, and while I do love me some numbers I do want to be able to see the impact, build something that grows, build something where I see the way in which people's lives are directly better off as a result.

Working in finance has made me really appreciate the depths of our capital markets. It's truly staggering the level of wealth sloshing around looking for ways to be put to use. Most wealth doesn't want to sit in a bank collecting itnerest, most of it wants to be put to productive use, invested anything from new and novel projects to boring capital intensive infrastructure build outs. I certainly believe there are huge issues with modern American capitalism, regulator capture and corrupt interests, but at the end of the day I do really believe that so much modern abundance is as a result of Capitalism wiht it's constant need to best use our existing wealth towards future prosperity. It's easy to lose sight of how unimaginably better and more abundant our lives are today than 200 years ago.